The case studies in the second half of this book offer no neat narratives of formal change in garden design, nor do they claim a form of garden characteristic of women. Rather, in constructing an account of how individual women wrote of themselves and their gardens throughout the century, they seek to explore some of the ways in which the garden might be inhabited and imagined. That imagining and habitation at times has little to do with the formalities of design; but it has much to do with the activity of gardening and with the experience of retirement – however they might be defined.

At the beginning of this book I suggested that women's experience of retirement was affected by the peculiar nature of retirement itself, at once an invitation to pleasure and to resignation, to suffering and to delight. I suggested another peculiarity, too, which is that eighteenth-century archives offer us only limited access to the experience of most women who spent their time in gardens: we must move some way up the social scale if we are to find sustained accounts of women's gardening life. It is with one such account, by a woman from the lower reaches of the middling sort, that we can conclude.